Yesterday the New York Times had an editorial about network neutrality. They employed a great analogy: “When someone calls your home, the telephone company puts through the call without regard to who is calling. In the same way, Internet service providers let Web sites operated by eBay, CNN or any other company send information to you on an equal footing.” They conclude, however, that Congress should enact net neutrality legislation to ensure that “equal footing.”
Here’s what I want to know: Given competition, how many consumers would stand for a phone company that didn’t put through everyone that called them unless the caller paid extra? The key here is competition. The NYT seems to understand this because it says that “Most Americans have little or no choice of broadband I.S.P.’s, so they would have few options if those providers shifted away from neutrality.” That’s debatable. But even if it weren’t, wouldn’t seeking more competition be the ultimate solution?
I started work at the Cato Institute at the beginning of 1997, and here it is 2006. As I write, I know that very few of the reforms that I and other free-marketers advocate have ever been enacted. Some bad legislation has been prevented (opt-in!); some unconstitutional legislation has been voided; the FCC has continued to move towards something more like real property rights in spectrum at an absurdly incremental pace. But universal service has not been abolished or even replaced with targeted subsidies or auctions. Indecency rules continue to be used to harass broadcasters. A few predicted that the Net would make censorship impossible, or that cyberspace would become its own sovereign nation. Yet China censors the Net with mixed success; Yahoo and other companies must cooperate or get out.
In spite of this, I am full of hope for the future…
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The UN’s World Summit on the Information Society ended today with the U.S.–or more precisely Internet users around the world–coming up winners. Efforts to impose international controls over Internet governance were firmly beaten back. Instead, the summit only called for creation of an advisory “International Internet Governance Forum,” with no binding authority. The new forum will meet next year in Greece.
Efforts to impose international control over the Internet, of course are unlikely to go away. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said as much earlier this week, stating that the Tunis agreement highlights the need for more international participation in discussion of Internet governance issues. The question is how to achieve this. Let those discussions continue.” For this reason, the new forum bears watching, lest it morph into an international regulatory body.
Still, its hard not to be pleased, and relieved, at this week’s outcome. The quote of the week goes to Commerce Department telecom chief Michael Gallagher, who said: “The Internet lives to innovate another day because of our combined efforts here.”
Kudos for the outcome are due to the Bush Administration for standing firm on this critical issue. Administration policymakers –including Gallagher and state department official David Gross–recognized early the dangers of globalizing Internet governance, and stood firm in their opposition.
Thanks also should go to the government of Tunisia, who hosted the conference. Its efforts to blot out unpleasant dissent during the conference–which included the blocking of websites from the country–did far more than any speech or policy paper to highlight the critical importance of protecting Internet freedom.
(For some interesting takes on the Tunis summit and its implications, check out the discussion held at The Heritage Foundation yesterday on the subject–featuring Sen. Norm Coleman, Rep. John Doolittle, fellow TLFer Adam Thierer and The Heritage Foundation’s John Tkacik.)
Delegates and other assorted hangers-on are gathering in Tunis this week for tomorrow’s start of the UN’s “World Summit on the Information Society.” Given the topic, one would expect a fairly free flow of information surrounding the event–for appearance sake, if nothing else. Not so. Reports are that Tunisian authorities broke up a meeting on press freedom, beat up a French journalist, and blocked access inside the country to a website of a side event called the “Citizen Summit on the Information Society.”
Certainly an odd way to begin a summit on the information society. If this is what happens when a government is on its best behavior, what happens when nobody is watching? No wonder there’s so much opposition to plans–to be debated at the summit–to “globalize” governance of the Internet.
The Tunis summit, by the way, will be the subject of a Heritage policy forum on Thursday, November 17 at 10 am. Speakers include Sen. Norm Coleman, Rep. John Doolittle, Heritage China expert John Tkacik and fellow TLF blogger Adam Thiere. If you are in DC, stop by. If not, you can catch it on the web. Details here.
I’ve got a new article up at Brainwash about the confused state of the debate over Internet governance. Most pundits seem to assume that ICANN has vastly more power than it really does. ICANN’s authority is largely dependent on the support of the Internet community. It can’t kick people off the Internet, censor them, or invade their privacy.
What it does do is perform an important coordinating functions that helps the world Internet community reach consensus on technical quesitons. It’s vital that that process not be undully politicized. The UN has neither the technical expertise nor the institutional self-restraint to excercize that role effectively.
Still, it would have a certain amount of poetic justice. The UN has spent the last 60 years pretending to keep order in the realm of international politics while, in reality, nations mostly ignored them and did as they pleased. It would be fitting if the UN attempted to assert its authority over the Internet, only to find that people ignored them there as well.
Three Cheers for Sen. Norm Coleman! He recently introduced a Sense of the Senate resolution “to protect the U.S.’s historic role in overseeing the operations of the Internet from an effort to transfer control over the unprecedented communications and informational medium to the U.N.”
In his statement, Sen. Coleman argued that:
“There is no rational justification for politicizing Internet governance within a U.N. framework. Nor is there a rational basis for the anti-U.S. resentment driving the proposal. Privatization, not politicization, is the Internet governance regime that must be fostered and protected. At the World Summit next month, the Internet is likely to face a grave threat. If we fail to respond appropriately, we risk the freedom and enterprise fostered by this informational marvel, and end up sacrificing access to information, privacy, and protection of intellectual property we have all depended on. This is not a risk I am prepared to take, which is why I initiated action to respond on a Senate level to this danger.”
YOU GO NORM! I love it.
Faithful readers of this blog will know that this issue really gets me worked up. Here’s my recent Wall Street Journal editorial on the issue that I penned with my old friend Wayne Crews of CEI. And two years ago, Wayne and I also co-edited a massive collection of essays on Internet governance / jurisdication issues entitled “Who Rules the Net.” Our point in the book and that recent editorial was simple: We stand at a crucial moment in the history of the Internet and unless we stand firm in opposition to those who seek to impose an international regulatory regime on this vibrant, borderless technology of freedom, the Internet as we know it today will die.
Let’s hope that other members of Congress and the Administration will join Sen. Coleman in this important effort to protect the Internet from the global regulatory / bureaucratic nightmare that looms overhead today.
What’s the best way to savage the U.N., E.U., etc.? With humor.
Over on CircleID, there’s a great post illustrating the combined hubris and stupidity of the European bureaucrats who are making a project of ‘Internet governance.’
(The phrase ‘Internet governance’ can only be put in single quotes because it’s nonsensical. The Internet is not a thing.)
This Saturday, my old friend Wayne Crews of CEI and I had an editorial in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal dealing with the increasing calls for more “global governance” of the Internet. In our essay, “The World Wide Web (of Bureaucrats),” Wayne and I point out that we are at a critical moment in the history of the Internet, with calls for collective global governance coming from many different quarters.
A “U.N. for the Internet” model would be a disaster, we argue, since it would allow regulators from across the globe to get their paws on the Net and start imposing a variety of confusing, country-specific cultural and legal standards on this open, borderless network or networks. We conclude the essay by noting that, “if laissez-faire is not an option, the second-best solution is that the legal standards governing Web content should be those of the ‘country of origin.’ Ideally, governments should assert authority only over citizens physically within its geographic borders. This would protect sovereignty and the principle of ‘consent of the governed’ online. It would also give companies and consumers a ‘release valve’ or escape mechanism to avoid jurisdictions that stifle online commerce or expression. The Internet helps overcome artificial restrictions on trade and communications formerly imposed by oppressive or meddlesome governments. Allowing these governments to reassert control through a U.N. backdoor would be a disaster.”
On a related note, I also encourage you to read this excellent new editorial by Carl Bildt, the former prime minister of Sweden. Bildt argues that, “It would be profoundly dangerous to now set up an international mechanism, controlled by governments, to take over the running of the Internet. Not only would this play into the hands of regimes bent on limiting the freedom that the Internet can bring, it also risks stifling innovation and ultimately endangering the security of the system. Even trying to set up such a mechanism could cause conflicts leading to today’s uniform global system being Balkanized into different, more or less closed systems.”
Amen to that.
Solveig Singleton and I recently released a short analysis of the ongoing ICANN dispute over the proposed “.xxx” top-level domain (TLD). In our PFF Progress Snapshot, we point out that important issues are raised by the recent effort of the United States to intervene at the last moment and interfere with the creation of this new TLD. I encourage you to read our paper but before you do so, if you need some good background on this issue, I highly recommend that you first visit the Internet Governance Project web page and speficially look at the petition that Prof. Milton Mueller and several other ICANN experts put together on this issue.
CNET News.com reports that the vote to create a .xxx top-level domain has been delayed–again. This is the second delay, no doubt for the same reason as the initial delay in voting–political pressure from the U.S. government.
In a previous post, I ranted about the dangers of governments getting into the business of Internet governance. There are serious censorship concerns, folks, when there is political intervention in the Internet’s core technical administrative functions. And that’s why I urge you to read and sign this online petition by the Internet Governance Project.
Is the delay in approving/denying the .xxx application really the start of Internet governance gone bad? That’s my fear, and combined with (1) a controversial “Declaration of Principles” wherein the US argued that in order to preserve the “security and stability” of the Internet and the economic transactions that take place on it, it would exercise unilateral control over the DNS, and (2) a World Society of the Information Summit meeting this November where the international community will want to wrestle control from the U.S. and assert UN dominance, and we may have a battle royal in the making. Fellow TLF member Adam, in an article with Solveig Singleton, agrees that this fight could become bitter given the current global environment of anti-Americanism. Stay tuned….
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.